Courtesy of commenter “max from australia”, a juicy quote from a former Pope which accords with Chateau Heartiste analysis of the deleterious blowback from the availability of widespread, cheap contraceptives (of the sort never before experienced by humanity until relatively recently):
Predictions from a wise Celibate bloke in a dress, Pope Paul VI, 1968 Humanae Vitae (Latin, “Human Life”)
“Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men—especially the young, ….. growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion” (HV 17).
Pope Paul VI was close to the mark, but he forgot to mention the distaff side the equation; specifically, that as cheap contraceptives silently and subtly move men toward devaluing women, so too does the technology move women toward devaluing beta males, those bitter losers in the sexual market (note: I did not say marriage market or child market) for whom contraceptives, coupled with female economic self-sufficiency, have rendered them practically superfluous as primetime sexual partners.
The mass-produced condom and the Pill have freed men from feeling obligation for women as much as they have freed women to regularly and blithely pursue what was historically risky sex with caddish alpha males on the make.
The contraceptive is, in practice, a female hypergamy facilitator.
It’s funny for me to write this, because contraceptives have, in fact, been very very good to me. I did a back of the envelope calculation and figured that my aggregate sex life would have been truncated by 90% if contraceptives were prohibitively expensive, unreliable and hard to get. A world in which women had to grapple with real, palpable fears of STDs, pregnancy and subsequent abandonment is, not to put too fine a point on it, a really shitty world for womanizers and serial monogamists and uncomplicated lovers of the art of seduction itself. I imagine I’d have to *gasp* start promising marriage or some such claptrap to any woman I wanted to bang, just to loosen her up enough to unhook her bra.
I am on record as predicting that the Six Sirens of the Sexual Apocalypse will be the cultural and technological juggernaut that hastens, if it is not the sole cause of, the death of Western civilization.
Is this revelation, this knowledge, supposed to turn me from my wicked ways? Here I am, standing at the edge of the abyss, pointing into its bowels like a histrionic jester, leading the ignorant and the deluded to peer into the void and imploring them — no, more precisely taunting them — to heed my warning of their desolate future…
and still I cavort insouciantly along its lip, secretly relieved that no one will seriously weigh my prophecies.
Pope Paul VI, apparently, was as far-seeing as I. Yet his vision of the good world, the civilized world — a vision with which I find no quarrel — would, if it were fully realized, necessarily mean a lot less fun for me. And that’s a reality I can’t abide; my own private delusion.
[crypto-donation-box]
